Frank Miller's relations with Jim Shooter

Here's a recent Hollywood Reporter interview with veteran artist Miller, where he continues his otherwise uninspired relay of what his relations with past comics veterans were like, and he even had the audacity to praise a certain overrated movie that unfortunately took plenty at the box office:

Miller has also been catching up on his moviegoing, and had seen Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, which he calls “extravagant.” The creator behind Spartan story 300 knows his way around an ancient Greek myth or two (he can easily slip into expounding on Corinthian style helmets and their influence on Sparta) and says the movie “really did an awful lot right.”

Well this is a shame, but not all that surprising Miller would ignore some of the wokest workings in Nolan's new movie, which again, regrettably grossed plenty of dough, even if it did eventually go down in sales after 3 weeks. I have no idea if it'll turn the profits the studio's doubtlessly hoping it will, or whether it'll make waves in the USA in the end, but what Nolan's brewed up sounds so unappealing based on its eyebrow raising lack of sex, though I will say I'm relieved if it's not overly gory, although this article seems to indicate it may still have something disturbing. Which is reason enough for me to be discouraged. Maybe the problem is that no distinctions are made between sex that's in good or bad taste. Miller certainly doesn't seem interested in addressing all that. And it actually makes his superficial take on the film almost hilarious.

Your book is part memoir and part lessons in creativity. Why do it this way?

I got my career started by calling up Neal Adams’ office and getting a meeting with him. Neal Adams was the premier artist in comics at the time, and his art had a great effect on me as a child. And he was listed in the phone book. And I got to meet him that day, an hour after I called. And he looked over my drawings and told me they were terrible and sent me off. I redid them and I saw him again and again and again. And he was always a harsh critic, but every time he taught me more and more, sometimes doing drawings over them. And, and as the months went by, he got me my first job and he continued to be a sensei and an advisor to me on things professional and on how to deal with being an artist in the world and many other things. Years passed and I became successful. And one time, Neal and I were at a comic book convention and I just took him aside and I just said, “Neal, how do I thank you for what you’ve done for me? You’ve never asked me for anything.” And he said, “Oh, there’s only one thing you can do. Do the same thing for the next guy.” Well, this book really is my attempt to do the same thing for the next guy. And to commit to paper my experiences, my observations and, and the lessons learned in making comic books.

If that next guy were Will Eisner, he sure hasn't done much to thank him, recalling he spoke about him negatively in the American Genius documentary. Also, what lessons learned? That he should never ever have developed the Holy Terror GN over 15 years ago? Now here's what he says about working with the late Jim Shooter at Marvel:

Speaking of mentors, Jim Shooter (the wonderkid who became Marvel’s polarizing editor-in-chief through the 1980s) was also one. Do you remember the first time you met him?

My first memorable encounter with Jim was at the Marvel offices. I basically came in and was sort of selling my services. I’d gotten some little job, doing some little three-pager of something like Doc Sampson and that had gotten his attention enough to want to keep me around. And, he gave me his lecture on storytelling. Everything was always storytelling with Jim because he felt comics had really lost track of their basic mission, which was to enchant and compel young readers with gripping stories.

He came in on a fairly loose pack of people who were all over the map creatively. And he worked to pull it all together into a more cohesive unit.

There were a lot of writer-editors and little fiefdoms at the time.

Right. He focused more than ever on the concept of a Marvel universe.

How did you guys work together?

He was eager to change things and I was eager to learn. And we both had strong opinions. I think one of the reasons we got along was we were both up for a good argument. Arguments can be a very creative thing and a very good thing.

Be that as it may, Shooter's focus on the concept of the MCU included pushing the whole concept of line-wide crossovers, something that's sugarcoated quite a bit these days without any objectivity, and no questions as to whether it helped Marvel and DC artistically to go galaxies out of their way to turn out repeated crossovers every year, and increasingly, more than one every year, effectively making it increasingly difficult to find any creative autonomy at either company. That's something Miller doesn't dwell upon, even as he tells why he left Marvel, for DC and later Dark Horse:

You left Marvel in a pretty high profile fashion twice. And I say high profile because your profile was very high and you were creatively cresting, twice with Daredevil. What caused you to leave that first time?

Well, I didn’t leave anybody. I chose to take a project to another publisher who was more amenable to kind of freedom I wanted to do it with. The message underneath all this was that it was important to demonstrate that talent is portable. Let me say that. When a publisher is releasing your work, that does not mean you’re saying an oath of allegiance to a military operation. It’s not a marriage.

But again, no in depth mention of but one of the ways creative freedom was turned into a thing of the past at the Big Two. Nor of how horrific it's become ever since figures like Joe Quesada and Dan DiDio originally took over as EICs, and has never recovered even after they left. Why doesn't Miller have the courage to get into any of that? Perhaps because he never had much respect for Marvel and DC's creations to begin with? After all, he only seems to care about his own stories, and few others. He does address something I can't recall hearing about before at Marvel:

Uh, speaking of stories that never happened, what happened with the Doctor Strange run you were supposed to have with writer Roger Stern?

On that one, I really had come to realize that I was just dying to write my own material. And, I couldn’t wait anymore. I had to start writing and drawing my own comics and, you know, start being a cartoonist rather than just an illustrator.

Even back then, I think it's better Miller didn't take part. He may have at least a few science-fantasy themed stories in his resume, but it seems like the stuff less emphasizing of that genre is what he's most known for, and maybe for the best. Somehow, his artwork doesn't seem like a good fit for even the Sorceror Supreme, though I realize he must've been considered based on the dark themed stories he's most known for. As for Stern, he was a talented writer back in the day, but he regrettably has appalling viewpoints too, like his positions on Mary Jane Watson, where he acted like she was a real person, and look what good it did for comics in general ever since. All because people like Stern, much like Joe Quesada, had to be so petty and pointless.

The time of Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen and Maus is looked at like a revolutionary era at this point where comics were reinvented. How healthy is the comic art form now? Is the wall still being pushed?

Sure it is. I mean, it’s easy to look back on that time and say, “Wow, what a sunburst. That changed everything.” But in fact, that was a pretty small amount of work that we’re talking about that caused a big splash and that’s what people remember at the time. Because people tend to remember the stuff that really made a splash when they think back on a given period. We certainly have a pretty wildly diverse amount of stuff coming out now.

Well if there's anywhere the form isn't being pushed, it's at the Big Two. And if Miller meant what he said, why did he all but disown Holy Terror 8 years ago in a defeatist interview with the UK Guardian? It didn't even help prevent him from being shunned by a UK convention. Something he's never seemed to address either.

This year, there was upheaval at Dark Horse Entertainment, the home of your Sin City books. But you announced a new book that you’re writing, Invasive Species, with them. How did you decide to stay at Dark Horse for the new book and not take it elsewhere?

Well, the relationship was a good and strong one, and it served us all very well. I met with the people there. The philosophies of the company seemed to be close enough to what I’d always known them to be, and they certainly had the infrastructure to do a good job at it.

Going back to Sin City, the only thing happening now is the Western that is being drawn by Milo Manara, right?

Right now, yeah, but I’ve got a dozen ideas for new ones. Sin City is my life’s work, more than anything. Milo is well along. I just gotta teach him how to draw girls. (Laughs.)

Gee, I wonder how that'll turn out, and what Miller means? I remember when Manara got censored or cancelled at Marvel over an absurd illustration he did of Spider-Woman's butt, for a series that didn't get much fanfare, and was cancelled and forgotten pretty quickly. What if Miller's gone so woke, he'll want Manara to dumb down his art styles for the wrong reasons? Based on Miller's positive comment about Nolan's Odyssey adaptation, it wouldn't be too shocking if that were the case.

Here's also an extra interview Popverse did with one of Miller's business partners, Silenn Thomas, who oversaw the American Genius documentary, and what he's got to say about working with Miller:

You are CEO of Frank Miller Ink, COO of Frank Miller Presents. What does that entail besides… well… everything?

Thomas: Well, you said it. It entails everything, and as you know well, “with great power comes great responsibility.”

You've been working with Frank for a number of years, even before becoming CEO of his shingle. What have you learned about him as a creator?

Thomas: I met him on the movie 300, and one consistent thing with [Frank Miller] is that he is one of the hardest-working people I have ever met. His dedication to excellence is absolute.

Yeah, and look how that turned out for the adaptation of the Spirit comic strip, and also the Robocop sequels and the sequel to the Sin City movie. Certainly if we take his cinematic ventures into consideration. But if the comics matter, his artwork's long become mediocre, and it's hard to say he's dedicated to excellence based on that.

You directed the recent documentary Frank Miller: American Genius. What did you learn from doing it, and taking it on the road for screenings?

Thomas: I have gained a deeper understanding of comics and its culture. The project gave me an all-access pass. I saw the universe of comics in every corner of the world. Taking it on the road now at festivals, conventions, and schools has been exhilarating. It was a joy to make, and it is a joy to show.

And I guess Miller's regression to a left-wing advocate's also quite exhilarating and overjoying, huh? Such signs turned up in the documentary, and that makes it less appealing.

My editor Chris has told me of how much of a champion and protector you are of Frank in the worlds of comics, movies, TV, and even cons. Where did you learn to be such a carer while also managing the business side of things and standing up for people?

Thomas: At the rebel camp on Tatooine in Star Wars. All jokes aside, what else is there? I believe we are in a creator-driven era. At least, that is the side I’m on.

Trouble is, what if Mr. Thomas is only willing to champion and protect anybody who's as left-wing as Miller sadly remains? Some creator driven era it'll be then. These are yet more examples of why I'm just not impressed with Miller by today's standards, and would rather not work with him if I were in the business myself. And maybe a most prominent reason why, other than his troubling politics is that he's too obsessed with the darkness, and not enough with the lightness. Which has become a very sad staple of modern entertainment as we know it.

Animation can be a great spot for superheroes, but only if they aren't subject to PC

Indiewire says there's animated series based on superhero fare that's more interesting than the live action film adaptations, but unshockingly, they sugarcoat the presentations, beginning with what the Supergirl movie was adapted from:

“Supergirl,” the second film in James Gunn’s developing DCU and one of the biggest box office bombs of an otherwise strong year for movie theaters, isn’t the worse movie I watched in 2026. But it’s probably the most disappointing. An adaptation of an acclaimed standalone series called “Woman of Tomorrow,” “Supergirl” has a great lead in Milly Alcock and nothing else worth remembering. Whereas the comic it is based on is stunningly bright and beautiful to look at, “Supergirl” is a murky, brown-tinted eyesore. Its generic plot strands the character in a sci-fi universe that feels microscopically small, populated by third-rate archetypes the “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies would barely have time for. There are interesting threads to unravel regarding Kara’s grief and anger, but the story she’s stranded in doesn’t have time to do that in any meaningful way.

I just don't understand why we keep getting lectured about why the overrated Tom King's tale is a modern "classic". The artwork I've seen is certainly overrated. And King's stories about "trauma" are forced and contrived. And we're not told anything in regards to that.

Even more galling: as “Supergirl” was tarnishing the character’s reputation in movie theaters, a great adaptation of the character was airing on Adult Swim. “My Adventures With Superman,” an animated series reimagining the early career of the most famous superhero on the planet. Ostensibly, Clark Kent is the main character, but Season 2 introduced Kara (voiced in the show by Kiana Madeira), and the currently airing Season 3 — which airs its season finale this Sunday — sees her take center stage. And she rules: reimagined as a former brainwashed intergalactic conquerer attempting to atone for her misdeeds, the show’s Kara is charming, funny, badass, with a meaty arc about atoning for her misdeeds and a super cute romance with Jimmy Olsen (Ishmel Sahid) that slots right in with the show’s bright, optimistic tone and focus on these character’s day-to-day struggles contrasted with the sci-fi operatics. If “Supergirl” the movie only scratched the surface of the character’s potential, “My Adventures With Superman” takes the time to really examine what makes her tick.

“My Adventures With Superman” is one of three animated shows adapting popular comic book superheroes that ran over the course of this summer, along with “X-Men ’97” on Disney+, which concluded its second season earlier this week, and “Batman: Caped Crusader” on Amazon Prime, which premiered its second season in late July. Pitched to a slightly older audience than usual for an animated comic book series, teenage up as opposed to for children, these shows aren’t flawless. But as comic book film studios continues to struggle to adjust to a world where they are no longer the center of the entertainment landscape (give or take “Spider-Man”), these shows demonstrate that these characters are better suited for serialized storytelling in the first place.

Would this be the cartoon where Jimmy was changed from white to black? And where Lois Lane's turned into a short-cropped tomboy? In that case, I regret to say, but this puff piece amounts to little more than misleading the audience by obscuring how the production is allegedly optimistic with strings attached. It's also worth considering that, if Kara Zor-El was changed from an innocent girl to a former conqueror, brainwashed or not, that too, unfortunately, is tasteless. It's also symbolic of the modern era's inability to appreciate a simpler concept of a character who could be written with flaws and mistakes, but doesn't have to be written as that guilty of wrongdoing as Kara sounds characterized here.

One of the major criticisms of superhero cinema for the past decade has been its resolute sameness: while certain MCU movies may have loose genre window-dressing, they’re fundamentally tonally similar in their quippy characters and excess spectacle. But all three of these series have strong art direction and visions for these characters that feels spiritually true to the source material but also provides something fresh and new that fans haven’t seen before, and are all radically different from one another.

Heavily inspired by early 2000s anime, “My Adventures With Superman” is the bright, zippy, lighthearted offering. The show takes the characters and their battles seriously, but it provides a wonderfully comforting take on Superman that also heavily foregrounds the love story between Clark and Lois; it’s a rom-com as much as it is a series about fighting invading aliens. It works because of how well-drawn these versions of the characters are, and because his relationship with Lois was always what made the seemingly invulnerable Clark feel most human. If the 2025 James Gunn “Superman” film sometimes strained to reinvent the character’s optimism for modern audiences, “My Adventures With Superman” makes that challenge look effortless.

But again, we're not being told about the character design, and that's being dishonest with the readership, for the sake of virtue-signaling. They may not have done to Kara's hair what they did Lois', but that's still no excuse, and that Lois' ethnicity may have also been changed only further (she looks darker complected in the cartoon) confirms the disrespect the producers actually have for Siegel and Shuster's creations. The writer also made sure to take a biased look at the aforementioned Marvel cartoon:

“X-Men ’97” is another successor of a ’90s kids’ cartoon, albeit a direct sequel. The 1992 “X-Men” animated series that aired on Fox during the decade was a foundational series for fans of the Marvel superhero team, providing definitive versions of the mutant protectors in all their messy, soapy excess. “’97” picks up where the series left off, but again ages up the content for adults who grew up with the series for a much darker tone. The animation emphasizes fidelity to the original show and the time period’s garish aesthetic in general, for a show that, more than almost any film, truly feels like picking up and reading five random issues of a comic run from 30 years ago.

Not all of these series are of equal quality. “My Adventures with Superman” has been the most consistent of the three, a nice good time throughout all three seasons without ever being exceptional. “Caped Crusader” Season 1 was a promising start, but Season 2 ramped up the stakes and serialized storytelling for a much improved follow-up. “X-Men ’97,” meanwhile, had a near flawless debut season, but a divisive Season 2 that struggled with unfocused storytelling and weaker stakes, albeit with a standout fourth episode that ranks among the best of the series (the show’s production was likely marred by the firing of head writer Beau DeMayo during work on Season 2 for allegations of sexual harrasment).

No surprise they'd sugarcoat X-Men 97 as well. They made Rogue otherwise sexless, drew Storm with a mohawk forcibly, and even the treatment of Morph was reprehensible. The part about the darkness predictably goes by without objectivity, and seriously, what "fidelity" is there truly here? And why does the writer talk about being "unexceptional" when Jimmy's ethnicity was changed, while Lois was made to look unattractive, and Supergirl gets a questionable premise shoehorned onto her? Such dishonesty indeed.

I'd spoken before about why brightness and optimism can't come with strings attached, yet that's exactly what the producers of My Adventures With Superman did, and it's disgraceful how Indiewire's writer doesn't have the courage to admit it's ludicrous, divisive, and conflicts with entertainment value. Animation can certainly be a great venue for superheroics, but not if woke changes are forced onto established creations. There was once a saying that change must be consistent with what came before, and the Hollywood phonies who turned out these items certainly aren't proving much different from the live action moviemakers who race-swapped and sex-swapped any of the characters in specific adaptations.

Baseball franchises being turned into comics collectibles

From this Major League Baseball announcement, it sounds more like Zero-Zero Entertainment, the publisher of these comics, is interested in catering to the speculator market as much as the mainstream industry itself:

Calling all comic lovers and baseball fanatics: All Baseball Comics is debuting a collection of three officially licensed books to expand your collection.

Centered on the thesis that baseball is “the story of America,” the trio of issues features one spotlight on each of the Yankees, Dodgers and Cubs. They are available for preorder now on baseballcomics.com. Issues are listed at $19.99 apiece for standard printed versions, while a signed variant cover is also available for $49.99.

The history of these teams may be well worth telling, but marketing the comics as collectibles instead of history stories is the grave error made here. And seriously, people have to pay that much for something only 32 pages long? This is only taking advantage of customers for the sake of quick bucks, and does a disservice to the very sport they claim to be honoring.

What's more, if they can't tell a story that's the length of a paperback, which could be 50 or 100 pages, then they've proven they lack the talent and dedication needed to honor the sport of baseball. I'm sorry, but this is nothing more than a foul ball rife with cheating customers. 3 strikes and you're out. Once again, the medium's being exploited for profit instead of talent and dedication, and this only proves the point all the more why comics have to stop relying on the pamphlet model.

Art Spiegelman continues his far-left act

The UK Guardian interviewed far-left cartoonist Art Spiegelman, who says America's in need of a "counter-revolution", which sounds very appalling coming from his perspective. And when he began drawing comics again after a hiatus in the post-911 years, this is what he did:

He produced a series about 9/11 for the German magazine Die Zeit, which was later run by other European magazines and American Jewish weekly the Forward. On one page he describes himself as “equally terrorised by al-Qaida and by my own government”. He felt that other American publications were too quiescent in the aftermath of the attacks, and not yet receptive to his fear that the US government was using 9/11 as cover for a massive crackdown on civil liberties and to launch xenophobic wars. “Sigh! It’s hard to be an artist who is consistently Seconds Ahead of His Time,” he writes in the foreword to In the Shadow of No Towers, a book that compiled these comics and is being reissued to mark the 25th anniversary of 9/11. (Although, he says, it may come out late – a shipment has been held up in the strait of Hormuz.)

Why was he so alert to the implications for US civil liberties? “Well, my tendency is not to trust the government, so that came easily,” he says. “But it also seems so obvious, like all of a sudden there were police cars and military trucks on Canal Street. We were being told where we could walk, where we couldn’t walk, what we could say, what we couldn’t say. It’s visceral. It’s not like: ‘OK, I’ve read this book on propaganda and here’s how it works.’” Spiegelman notes the direct link between the post-9/11 security crackdowns and some of the excesses of the Trump administration: Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Ice, was created in the aftermath of the terror attacks.

Sounds like he doesn't respect special rules set in place for security reasons. And he seemed less offended by al Qaeda's behavior than by his government's. Very troubling. Let's be clear. The Bush administration did do some bad things. But to say it was inherently wrong to deploy security measures in the USA meant to prevent further jihadist attacks at the time is very disturbing, and takes away from the more serious issues involved. Though if Spiegelman doesn't trust the government, is that only when a right-wing government's in office? Does a left-wing government count?

Also note how he's indicated he's anti-ICE, and that too says something, considering how many sex offenders infiltrated the USA, and some of al Qaeda's terrorists also got into the country through lax immigration policies, and, with the spread of Islam in the USA, things could chillingly get worse. Is that what Spiegelman wants? I don't know, but the following is very chilling:

When it comes to 9/11, however, Spiegelman’s perspective has shifted. He no longer views the day as an “end of the world moment”. “It was a big deal. But it was a small big deal compared to the big deals that are going on now,” he tells me. “I’d much rather be in New York than in Iran, for example.”

This is disgusting, because it minimizes the tragedies and losses of 911 Families, many of whom recently launched a petition to have NYC mayoral incumbent Zohran Mamdani barred from the 911 Memorial, based on some of the most offensive things he's said and done that also minimize the repulsive incident from a quarter century ago, along with the memory of the actual victims. And Spiegelman's comment on Iran is fishy. Does he believe it wrong for the Trump administration to take down a barbaric dictatorship? I don't know what Spiegelman believes in fighting for at all.

Around 50 minutes after Spiegelman fires up his Nespresso machine, he finishes making two coffees, and we carry them up to his sunny roof terrace, which as he promised has beautiful views of downtown Manhattan. Spiegelman muses that the US’s volatile politics might reflect humankind’s natural tendency to self-destruction. “I guess, after a while, you get restless, so if you get too comfortable you create problems for yourself, even in more mundane, small-time life, never mind as a nation. At this point, we just had the bad luck of having a megalomaniac walking onto the scene,” he says, of the Trump presidency. American politics is, after all, “entertaining if you don’t give a shit, if you’re nihilistic”.

Spiegelman’s mood is sombre as he discusses how Trump has “very effectively dismantled” the country’s democratic ideals: “Whatever the ideals were, we never lived up to them, but at least we had them. Now it’s all so cynical and sordid and stupid.” The president “is cutting off civil liberties and using his powers to squelch dissent and enrich himself in such thoroughly illegal ways, it’s kind of mindblowing”, Spiegelman says, and he finds himself watching in alarm as the “plutocrat in chief” and his “few dozen toadies” get ever richer while ordinary Americans struggle and suffer a “new indignity every day”. He has no hesitation in describing the Trump administration as fascist. “It’s fascism,” he says. “It’s not nazism, per se, but it has a template that it’s following. And it does have to do with othering, which is the basis of what Maus is about, it’s: ‘OK, you guys are mice, we’re cats.’” Maus is among the many books to be banned by various Republican school boards in recent years, but Spiegelman says he has a “predilection” for producing the kind of art people will seek to ban. Sales of Maus spiked in response to the bans.

“I tend to be pessimistic, but this is worse than most things I know,” he says of American politics. “I just don’t see how we get out of this.” The media are struggling with how to convey the stakes in this post-truth era, he explains, the courts are packed with Trump appointees, democratic norms have been destroyed, and there is no effective opposition. The Republicans are “at this point the equivalent of made men in the mafia,” Spiegelman says, “they’ve committed a murder, they’re complicit in something and they have to keep moving as a complicit unit, so it’s very hard to get someone to blow the whistle and say ‘This is crazy.’” The US needs a “counter-revolution”, Spiegelman says. “But I don’t know where to look for it because the Democrats are so timid.”

*Shudder*. That sounds like he wants riots, as if there weren't enough already 6 years ago. And no concrete evidence is given for the claim the Republicans "committed a murder", nor whether the courts are literally packed with Trump appointees, but not Biden's appointees. This is very troubling, and Spiegelman's hatred for right-wingers is very noticeable, making this much sadder.

The Daily Cartoonist notes there's a flaw in their claim Spiegelman was the first cartoonist to win a Pulitizer for Maus:

As we all know the Pulitzers had been handing out Prizes to cartoonists for 70 years before Spiegelman got his. Some quantify Spiegelman’s Pulitzer by explaining that he was the cartoonist to get a Pulitzer outside that Editorial Cartooning category as his Pulitzer was a Special Citation. But even that must be further narrowed down to the first cartoonist to receive a Pulitzer prize for a specific graphic novel since Dr. Seuss had earlier been awarded a Special Pulitzer for his body of work.

And I can't recall Spiegelman ever speaking in Theodor Geisel's defense after a number of the latter's children's books were withdrawn from publication because of alleged stereotypes. The Guardian's errors shouldn't be surprising though; they're a horrible newspaper of poor quality as it is.

Spiegelman's given signs he has a despicable, narrow viewpoint that totally absolves leftists of any mistakes they make, even as he says the Democrats are too timid to carry out his ideas of how to manage business. I have no interest in buying his products, and seriously, I don't find his artwork appealing anyway. The worst part is how guys like him never seem to speak of groups like 911 Families, and don't consider how actual victims of serious crimes feel about anything. His political views are insufferable, and if Trump is what he cares about, it's all he's going to care about. One more reason there's no point in wasting time on any comics and cartoons he illustrates.

Marvel failed the X-Men long ago, yet Collider thinks it's only recently this happened

Collider argues that Marvel is now failing the X-Men, as if it hadn't already happened, though it's interesting they take issue with one of the most overrated, pretentious leftist writers of modern times, Gail Simone, in their look at what she wrote in recent X-Men stories. The article doesn't begin well:

Comic books have come a long way since their advent in 1933, but they have evolved significantly over the last ten years as the industry has grappled with writing stories in a post-Comicsgate era. Still, some of the most celebrated titles have found themselves falling into familiar and oftentimes uncomfortable patterns.

When the writer starts subtly blaming Comicsgate, something's obviously gone wrong. That's just a distraction reducing the seriousness of the subject.

Few writers embody this evolution more uniquely than Gail Simone, whose early commentary helped redefine how gender and agency are understood in mainstream superhero media. In 1999, prior to her professional writing debut, Simone launched the website "Women in Refrigerators," coining a phrase that forever altered comic book criticism. Sparked by the infamous death of Kyle Rayner’s girlfriend Alexandra DeWitt (who was murdered and stuffed into a refrigerator in Green Lantern #54) the term described a pervasive industry trope where female characters were routinely killed, maimed, or otherwise de-powered purely to advance the emotional arcs of male heroes.

Simone’s sharp critique propelled her into the industry itself, where she swiftly became a powerhouse writer for both DC and Marvel, crafting acclaimed runs on titles like Birds of Prey, Wonder Woman, and even Deadpool while proving that female characters could anchor the same complex narratives as their male peers.

That legacy makes the last two years of her run on Uncanny X-Men all the more jarring. As the first woman to be the mainline’s sole writer, Simone benefited from a degree of “plot armor,” so to say, which allowed her early missteps to be given a pass. However, this run has slowly become a depressing descent into the very creative pitfalls she spent decades dismantling.

Rather than propelling the mutant flagship forward, Simone's work succumbs to clunky prose, dated characterizations, and a frustrating reliance on regressive tropes that feel out of character for not only the franchise, but Simone as a writer. Perhaps most glaring is how the narrative falters under the weight of subtle microaggressions and tone-deaf interpersonal dynamics, which begets the question of how an icon of feminist comic commentary could deliver a story so strangely out of step with her own established standard.

Unfortunately, she continued to work with DC even as they performed many of the same offensive acts she was supposedly against, and even her work on Birds of Prey may have contained allusions to Identity Crisis and Infinite Crisis, which dampens the impact of whatever she was supposedly trying to reverse. It's also worth considering her real life politics are another contradiction that make a joke out of her alleged mission. Even the artwork in some of her later projects became noticeably bad. So why do they suddenly say she's stumbled into "creative pitfalls"? She was sadly always a left-wing phony, and her attacks on J.K. Rowling only made things worse. And the writer appears to have forgotten one more chilling trope: when a girl is turned into a villainess for the sake of it. Another something I don't think Simone ever made a convincing effort to dismantle in her scriptwriting, and she never made a convincing effort to give ladies a complex narrative to rival the male cast members.

The most immediate, and perhaps least egregious, casualty of this run is the regression of Rogue and Gambit, whose iconic relationship is flattened into a hollow caricature. Rather than leading the team as a formidable leader in her own right, Rogue is reduced to little more than a domestic "tradwife" existing solely in relation to her husband. It quickly becomes evident that the narrative prioritizes making Gambit look effortless and cool instead of allowing Rogue to command respect as an actual leader.

Let me get this straight. The writer believes Simone turned Rogue into a "conservative" stereotype? Something tells me the columnist's not being altruistic. Besides, Rogue's potential as a character was damaged 3 decades ago, and Scott Lobdell could be considered the culprit. It's one thing to pair up 2 superhero figures, but another to do it in such sloppy fashion as Lobdell did it, which undermined characterization. It's interesting though, that the woman who wrote this Collider item actually feels Simone's doing stuff that's allegedly anathema to a leftist agenda, when she claims there's "microaggressions" in the script, and the talk of a "tradwife" also gives strong clues where this is really going.

Rogue's dialogue (and Remy's, admittedly) is weighed down by heavy-handed, exaggerated Southern phonetics that read more like mocking stereotypes than authentic regional voices. Compounding this domestic imbalance is the awkward insertion of Calico; forcing an infantilized teenage mutant into their immediate living situation pushes Rogue further into a suburban foster-parent trope, taking her even further away from the frontlines of mutant leadership. The narrative comes across as off-putting as Calico is written in a deeply juvenile way which includes seeing the teenage mutant crawling into bed with Rogue and Remy — a couple she has only known for a few months.

This superficial obsession with making Gambit look cool constantly sacrifices basic narrative logic for cheap, unearned hype. A glaring example occurs during a major battle sequence in Uncanny X-Men #32, where Remy abruptly transforms into the "Wyvern" — a monstrous form that has been teased relentlessly for nearly ten issues and hyped up on promotional art. Instead of delivering a dramatic, satisfying payoff to all of that teasing, the transformation arrives suddenly at a moment that makes little sense within the flow of the story.

The panel they presented doesn't show Gambit in bed while Calico's there, and Rogue's role in that segment is clearly meant to play something like a big sister figure who cheers up a protege who'd been suffering from a nightmare. I don't find Simone's writing appealing today, but it sounds like the columnist's looking for cheap excuses to tear down on motherhood/sisterhood. Nor does it show Gambit looking cool, which I assume means he's battling baddies. But that's not what happens in the material I've seen so far. In any case, if the writer's delegitimizing Gambit as a character by acting as though he's a real person, she's just perpetuating the rock bottom lapse in logic that's been going on for decades.

Most striking is the treatment of Monet St. Croix, a Black Muslim woman whose established characterization has always centered on bodily autonomy and a fierce opposition to incarceration. Reducing her to the temporary warden of Graymalkin — a fascist concentration camp where mutants are detained until human authorities arrive — completely guts the core of her identity, reframing a hero of liberation as an enforcer of state-sanctioned violence.

Monet, from what I know, was not created as a Muslim adherent in 1994. I think it was Peter David who was allowed to force that retcon onto the former Generation X cast member, 15 years ago. What occurred is similar to how heterosexual characters like Obsidian in Infinity Inc. were retconned into homosexual characters. What happened to Monet is atrocious in the extreme, and that the columnist appears to be fine with that also speaks volumes. In the Islamic world, women are treated as 2nd class citizens, and we're being lectured about "bodily autonomy" and opposition to incarceration? I'm sorry, but what's written sounds so deliberate, and again, like a lecture. If the writer's going to take such an accepting view of the Religion of Peace, then this article is politically motivated, though it does have some eyebrow raising details to tell:

Another recurring pattern in Simone’s Uncanny X-Men run is the abundance of cultural insensitivity and subtle microaggressions woven into the dialogue. Asian characters are routinely subjected to lazy, exoticized tropes. Of note, Logan casually refers to the young Japanese mutant Deathdream as a "manga kid,” which Simone glibly responded to criticism by framing it as Wolverine “incorrectly” calling him that. This casual bias rears its head again with Calico’s most recent interactions with Pietro Maximoff. Calico treats Pietro — a character of Romani heritage and a man of color — with a smug, condescending superiority (despite being in a moment of crisis), dismissively refusing to even view him as a true mutant.

Rather than celebrating the rich diversity that has long defined the franchise, these characterizations alienate readers, reducing an ambitious flagship era to a series of uncomfortable missteps. While there is some narrative explanation for Calico’s behavior, it is nevertheless jarring to see a blue-eyed, blonde-haired white woman othering a character who is, historically, the son of a Holocaust survivor. Coupled with the optics of tethering her to the franchise’s most cookie-cutter Southern couple, it feels as though Simone is doubling down on an inherent and accepted bias about Southern ideals.

Watching an industry titan like Gail Simone, whose entire legacy was built on dismantling harmful tropes, fall into these exact creative traps is a deeply disheartening turn for modern comic criticism — especially as she argues with fans of her writing on social media. Yet this failure does not rest solely on her shoulders; Marvel shares equal responsibility for allowing one of its most iconic flagships to languish without editorial discipline or vision.

Honestly, it's hardly a surprise if Simone doesn't respect any of the better qualities of X-Men from the past. Let's recall said quality definitely collapsed since the early 2000s, along with cohesion of continuity, and characterization. But truly, Simone never "dismantled" any harmful tropes, and she added insult to injury for the Atom by fully accepting the assignment of writing a DEI-pandering character of Asian background shoehorned into Ray Palmer's costume in 2006. It was cancelled about 2 years later, and 2 decades later still, nobody cares about a social justice pandering production. But if Simone really is resorting to harmful tropes, should this be a surprise? What it can suggest is that, if she was part and parcel of DC and Marvel's earlier embarrassments, and never took issue with what DC did to any female character not written by her, then she never had faith in her alleged positions to begin with. No wonder she's so overrated.

Since the X-Men is a subject, here's also an article on IGN telling why the X-Men don't have a role in a Wolverine video game:

While there are many mutants famous for being members of the X-Men in Marvel’s Wolverine, in the video game’s story the X-Men do not exist. Rather, Logan is a former member of Team X, the mutant black ops unit that includes the likes of Sabretooth and Mystique. Yes, Jean Grey is in the game, but she is not part of any group called the X-Men because it hasn't been formed yet. Put simply, don’t expect Cyclops to turn up in his comic accurate suit, dropping from the Blackbird under orders from Professor X back at the X Mansion.

But why? Why not have the X-Men exist in Marvel’s Wolverine? In an interview with IGN, narrative director Walt Williams said Insomniac was keen for the mutants in the game to not have a safe place to go to, to not benefit from being superheroes, but rather remind players that mutants exist on the outside — and Wolverine himself, who this game is all about, is perhaps the biggest outsider of them all.

“So Team X is canonical,” Williams began. “It is Logan's first team in his history. It was a black ops team from the '70s made up of wetworks mutant workers. So in telling Wolverine's story, we wanted to bring it back to the beginning of where his story really began in that long string of teams. Because as we know, he's been a member of many teams by this point in his 50-plus year history.

Well that's part of the problem with the comics since the early to mid-2000s, if we take the terrible Brian Michael Bendis' work on Avengers as an example. Several mainstay characters were dropped in favor of hilariously obvious choices like Wolvie and Spider-Man, with Scarlet Witch the biggest victim of jettisoning, yet the same people doing these interviews don't take an objective view of that, and it's no excuse for forcibly omitting his own team from reference. If they want to make this game a solo adventure, so be it, but I don't see why the X-Men have to be downplayed, or written out that forcibly.

“But really what we were looking to do is, because superheroes have become so mainstream at this point in just pop culture and everything through TV shows, comics, movies and everything, that even especially with our own Spider-Man games, these are characters with superpowers that a lot of the world has accepted, that they are celebrated. They have parades, they are honored and stuff. But mutants at the core are outsiders, even within the Marvel universe.

He acts like this has to be the norm at all times, and cannot be changed. Another decided problem. It's exactly what led to the Spider-marriage being thrown out with bath water 2 decades ago, and Mary Jane Watson paying a heavy price in the process.

It’s a detailed answer to a question that fans have been wondering about ever since Marvel’s Wolverine was revealed. And so, while you’ll get co-op gameplay with Jean Grey, she’s not in the story as Marvel Girl or wearing a suit we’ve seen from the X-Men comics. And without the X-Men knocking about, Logan and Jean are free to explore their own romantic relationship — assuming the game itself goes that far — free from Cyclops’ death stare.

Indeed, Williams confirmed to IGN that there is no Logan, Jean, and Scott Summers love triangle at play in Marvel’s Wolverine.

“I don't want to get too much into spoilers because obviously there's a whole story that we want everyone to experience as they play through it,” Williams said. “But I think it's safe to say that we are focusing on just Logan and Jean's relationship in Marvel's Wolverine.”

Gee, so that's what is considered a big deal? Up to the turn of the century, I can't recall if Wolverine was ever seriously seen pursuing a relationship with Jean, and Chris Claremont wrote Logan noticing she and Scott were an item in the late 70s, to the point where Logan quietly discarded some flowers he'd brought her in a trash bin at a hospital when Cyclops was around. It was only when Mark Millar being helming Ultimate X-Men that all of a sudden, exploring a love triangle became a big deal, because in this alternate universe, practically depicting Logan as morally bankrupt was somehow a great idea. But that alternate universe line was little more than one of the most overblown tales of its sort, and came at a time when mainstream was declining.

And it's a shame we once again have examples of MSM sources not admitting the X-Men went downhill long ago.

New Venom being set up using old character, who's now being called "amazing" in another pointless Spidey spinoff

IGN says Marvel, already having done Mary Jane Watson enough damage in recent Spider-Man storylines, is now putting Eddie Brock back together with the symbiote, and putting a member of Spidey's rogues gallery in another symbiote, in preparation for a miniseries spinoff called - surprise, surprise - "the Amazing Venom":

Marvel is in the midst of the Queen in Black crossover, which sees the world caught in the middle of a destructive conflict between Asgardian death goddess Hela and the symbiote god Knull. It's a watershed moment for Venom, Carnage, and every other character connected to the symbiote family. And it goes without saying that the landscape of the Spider-Man franchise will look much different when all is said and done.

Part of that involves the launch of a new monthly Venom series that sees Eddie Brock reunite with his beloved symbiote at long last. But there's also a new spinoff miniseries in the works called The Amazing Venom. Who or what is the Amazing Venom? To answer that question, we turned to writer Jordan Morris. In an email interview with IGN, Morris explains how this series takes a cult-favorite Spider-Man villain and elevates him to new, ridiculous heights. [...]

When all they can think of is recycle certain adjectives, it's another example of how creatively bankrupt they are, right down to how there's still no sign they'll ever restore the Spider-marriage, even if MJ is no longer being depicted as a female Venom host. But, who indeed is this "amazing" Venom?

So who is the Amazing Venom? None other than Fred Myers, formerly the costumed supervillain known as Boomerang, and a character who makes a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Fred has really come up in the world in 2026, as he's now bonded to a symbiote named Passenger and sporting a costume inspired by Spider-Man himself. As Morris explains, this new series serves as an exciting opportunity to fundamentally revamp a character who's suddenly been thrust into the forefront of the Marvel Universe.

"I love that Fred is a villain with simple ambitions," Morris tells IGN. "He doesn’t want to rule the world, he just wants to throw boomerangs at people and steal a bunch of money. I’d like to think that if I had access to exploding boomerangs and jet boots I’d be a hero, but if I ended up going villain, I’d probably go the Fred Myers route. It’s so funny that this two-bit scumbag keeps getting caught up in world-ending sci-fi madness. I mean, he got killed by a vampire and came back from the dead! That’s stuff that should be happening to Avengers or X-Men, not guys with boomerangs on their head."

Why not "civilian" co-stars? I sometimes wonder if the police captain Jean deWolff's death in the mid-80s was really called for, and civilians who aren't superheroes shouldn't be prohibited from the privilege of being able to be resurrected, a concept that's part and parcel of science-fantasy. What this Morris tells is insulting to the intellect.

It also sounds like the writer, most unfortunately, is opportunistically putting more tired and grating emphasis on villainy, which has become far overemphasized in modern times. That they even resorted to economy casting also speaks volumes. Looks like Marvel's done little more than bore the senses with yet more promotion of villainy over heroism. And that, again, is a leading problem with modern storytelling. We decidedly could do without Brock's new solo too.

Video game about boy trapped in comic book unfortunately also trapped in horror genre

InvenGlobal tells about a video gaame titled Yurei, which is about the following:

Yūrei is a psychological horror game set within the haunted pages of a comic book, developed by Team Yūrei. The game was created over five months by ten second-year master's students from Cnam-Enjmin, the National School for Video Games and Digital Interactive Media in Angoulême, France.

Players must follow the comic's progression, reading the story to reach its end. The comic book, which is stuck to the protagonist Jun's hand, constantly speaks to the player, sometimes offering hints and at other times presenting challenges to solve. It acts like a narrator, yet it may also force you to make sacrifices.

The premise of being inside a comic itself may be clever, but making it part of an overused genre is not. It's regrettable the horror genre continues to be what's used as a theme for these kind of computer games, when here, if they'd wanted to, they could've turned it into a fanciful adventure with a brighter setting, yet they stick to potentially violent themes instead. That's the biggest problem with modern entertainment, and no telling how to convince anyone why it needs to change.

And I hesitate to think what they mean by "sacrifices".

Digital comics are allegedly still a big deal

Publisher's Weekly wrote about the market of digital comics, and says it's ostensibly improving after a slump:

Less than three years ago, the lights on digital comics seemed to be getting dim. In November of 2023, Amazon announced the impending shutdown of the Comixology app—the platform that had accounted for the large majority of digital comics sales from every major U.S. publisher for the past 10 years.

But a new digital landscape was quietly developing, as both longstanding comics publishers and upstart digital retailers carved out new approaches to producing, selling, and reaching an audience for online comics. Could 2026 be the year that the comics industry fully comes into its digital era? We talked with publishers and retailers to find out.

The problem is that no sales figures, even digitally based, seem to turn up in this item, and that's the common modern weakness in such puff pieces. Though it does say here that:

Meanwhile, at Sweet Shop, another new retail platform that launched in beta in late 2025, Kenny Meyers has a different approach. In contrast to Neon Ichiban’s suite of features, Meyers believes that the key to digital success is to keep the app and market as simple as possible.

“There’s a lot more to [digital comics] than gimmicks,” Meyers says. “People just want, in my opinion, very simple, elegant ways to discover comic books.”

If the digital market avoids gimmicks like multiple variant covers, that's a good thing, but do people want entertainment value? That's what seems to be missing here. And then, once again, they sugarcoat DC/Marvel sales:

DC Comics has hardly been a late bloomer when it comes to digital comics. The company sold its first single-issue digital comic more than 15 years ago, and was among the first publishers to embrace day-and-date digital sales. In 2007, they even (briefly) attempted to launch a digital-first slate of all-original titles—the short-lived Zuda imprint.

Today, DC is coming off a heady year of growth, fueled by sales of its new Absolute Universe imprint and the surprising success of its digest-sized DC Compact Comics. By the end of 2025, the publisher even overtook Marvel in comics shop market share for the first time in years.

And as new readers came to DC, new digital sales followed. “We're finding an almost equal number of new readers coming in through physical and digital at the same time,” general manager Anne DePies says. “And once the digital readers come in, we've had meaningful success in seeing that they are purchasing across our ecosystem.”

Like other comic companies, DC doesn’t provide public figures for its total volume or revenue on digital sales, but DePies says that digital’s relative share of DC sales has remained remarkably stable over the past decade. That’s true of most other major publishers as well: at Dark Horse, VP of publishing sales Mark Bernardi says that digital readership leveled out to around 5% of sales many years ago, and has stayed in place ever since. At IDW, the share is a stable 10%. Image is a bit of an outlier; publisher and chief creative officer Eric Stephenson says digital sales have never recovered from a slide that started when Amazon bought Comixology.

I'm sorry, but failure to provide any public sales figures, which has been the norm for several years now, does nothing to convince. The ICV2 page they point at doesn't give sales figures either, and 5-10 percent is nothing to marvel at. Mainly because again, no sales figures are offered, yet they clearly hope everybody will take their word at face value. Any sales figures provided for the Absolute line were also laughable, as I recall. None of which matters to a puff publisher like Publisher's Weekly, unfortunately.

I'm sure the digital market has potential for the independent market, however. Perhaps provided, of course, that it's not a company like IDW turning out the products, seeing how far they've fallen in quality over the past decade. Yet there's suggestions the digital market, in the end, is doing no better than the print market, certainly if there's no genuine quality to accompany it.